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Welcome! Artfully Musing is a blog dedicated to sharing art and the techniques and products used. I'll be showcasing collage, altered and mixed media art as well as miniature. I hope you'll check back often and are inspired. Thanks for visiting! Laura

Saturday, March 14, 2015

For the
month of March at Alpha Stamps it’s all about Marie Antoinette in Wonderland. In imagining Marie in
Wonderland, I envisioned the residents seeing her outrageous outfit and wanting to get in on the act; which meant, mixing the Wonderland character’s heads with Rococo style bodies and wigs.

For the
Queen of hearts I used the dress and wig from the “How’s
My Hair” collage sheetand her head is from the “Were
all Mad Here" collage sheet”. Instead
of the little dog sitting on the back of the dress (as in the collage sheet) I
used the Cheshire cat with wig from the sheet.

I
decided that I needed more frames to play with so I’ve created a new digital set of frames as an addition to the Antique Frames set I created a few years
ago. This set contains 20 frames that
are great for backdrops or for use as architectural elements. I’ve used two of the frames as backdrops for
the Marie in Wonderland piece.

Digital
files can be resized, rotated or flipped as needed. The files are in a .png format. PNG formatted files
have a transparent background making
it easy to layer an image over other digital images. You can open .png files using graphic programs
like Photoshop Elements. Digital collage
sheets and digital images can be saved to your computer and printed as many
times as you wish.

PHOTOS OF THE ALTERED
CHARACTERS

To make
the bodies, heads and wigs fit each other I had to alter the sizes of some of
the images. If you missed it, I have a video
on YouTube that shows you how to take a snapshot of an image from a collage
sheet and then resize the image. You
might find this helpful if you don’t have a graphics program like Photoshop
with which to modify images.

For
those of you who resize your images in Photoshop, you might find as you enlarge
or shrink an image you lose the clarity or resolution of the image. This is particularly true when working with a
really small image. One of the things I
do is use the “Reduce Noise” feature. If
you are not familiar with this feature, you’ll find it by clicking on the “Filter”
option on the menu bar and then clicking on the “Noise” option. There are multiple options on the “Noise”
popup menu, one of which is “Reduce Noise”.

I chose
2 frames from the Elegant Frames digital set.
The large one on the right is approximately 8” tall and is exactly the
size it is in the image set. The other
frame which I printed twice was reduced to 90% of its original size from the
image set. I reduced it by the 10% to
make the scale of the smaller frames work better with the larger frame. The smaller frame (after reduction) is
approximately 5” tall.

To make
the frames more rigid and sturdy, I glued the images to thin chipboard and then
to decorative paper (so the piece would look pretty from the back).

To
attach the frames to the each side of the center piece and to make them curve inward
(which makes the piece stand on its own), I made wedges from chipboard.

The
size of the wedges depends upon where you want to attach them. Make them small enough that they are hidden
by the frame. I started by cutting two
thin strips of lightweight chipboard.
Next, I started bending them into the shape of a wedge. I bent the chipboard 3 times which gives you
4 sides. Three sides make the wedge and
the fourth side is used to glue the wedge to itself. Lastly, after gluing the wedge together, snip away the excess chipboard strip.

I
painted the wedges with Brass Liquid Pearls and glued them in place on the back
of the smaller frames.

Next,
glue the wedges on the smaller frames to the large center frame.

Now all
three pieces are combined with the outside frames curving slightly inward
causing the piece to stand without support.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

This is
a project I started over a year ago when I created the “Letters
from the Past &“Day’s
Gone By” collage sheets. I finished
it up this past summer and just haven’t gotten around to posting it.

The
core of the piece is made from a round box and a sea salt container.

I covered the top and bottom with decorative paper. For the center I used a scene from the Day’s
Gone By digital image set.

Around
the top piece I used lace, chipboard, brass swans, flat backed pearls, and images
from the collage sheets that are framed in a piece of brass.

For the
top I used a curtain rod finial.

Two of
the ladies are sitting on swing seats that are made from a piece of filigree hanging
from the top.

To
figure out where to hang the filigree swings, I marked where the center column
would go, spaced the filigree equally around the column and marked the holes
for the chain.

I used
jump rings to attach the chain to the filigree.

I used
an eye pin to attach the chains to the top piece. The loop of the eye pin is attached to the
chain and poked through the holes I marked earlier.I slipped a blue bead over the end of the eye
pin, snipped away the excess and looped the pin over the bead to hold it in
place.Note the blue beads with the loop
in the picture below.

Lastly,
I glued an eye pin to the bottom of the filigree and then poked the other end
through the center column, which kept the filigree (swing seat) level when I
glued the ladies in place. If you are not adding something to the swing seat that would make it off balance, you
don't need to do this.

Along
the bottom of the carousel I added ribbon, flowers, lace and fabric trim. At the very bottom is a wooden base and
beneath the base I attached a Lazy Susan hardware so that the carousel would
turn.